Rather than explaining how to write code for the ASP.NET stack, this article intends to walk through each of the major building blocks, providing information necessary to successfully deploy, upgrade, and administer the ASP.NET Web Stack in your organization.

Targeting newer versions of the .NET Framework gives you access to new/modified libraries, as well as performance improvements when executing your MSIL code in the new CLR

The managed libraries include ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), each of which have a dedicated team making improvements that ship together as a .NET Framework Release

Recently, some teams, especially ASP.NET have been shifting towards shipping releases out-of-band from the full framework as NuGet packages to enable faster release cycles

Although CoreFX will be made available as a fairly large number of individual NuGet packages, it will continue to ship periodically as a full unit that Microsoft has tested as a whole. These distributions will most likely ship at a lower cadence than individual packages, allowing time to perform necessary testing, fixes, and the distribution process.

Basically, the CLR will be different, the available libraries will be different and even the low level integration into IIS or self-hosted options are also different. All in all, the .NET Core 5 stack will be much lighter, a with a much smaller memory footprint.

Standard models, views, controllers, but also support for pre-compiled views to make refactoring safer, and find errors at compile-time

Advantages

Excellent performance, battle-tested over several years

Microsoft is heavily investing in continuing to develop the platform and drive towards better integration with common open-source tools such as Bootstrap, Bower, Grunt, and other packages available on NuGet

Built-in support for common security problems such as XSS, XSRF, SQL Injection, etc.

NuGet packages installed in a C# project can be restored at any time by the developers on your team from NuGet.org so there’s no need to embed shared DLLs in your application, or worry about dev/production systems having the exact same version of the .NET Framework installed

I’ll be writing a separate post in more detail about NuGet, but for now here’s a link to some interesting background on NuGet